Technological change driving ‘creative destruction’ in jobs market, says OECD

Check out Einstein's Guide to AI Use Cases—it's an interactive website that helps you get started on your journey with AI.

Venky Shankar presentation entitled “How Technology is Changing Retail”. Shankar presented his team’s ideas under four areas: retailer disintermediation, hybrid bundles, sharing economy, and retailer types.

Ensuring that your website or open web application is secure is critical. Even simple bugs in your code can result in private information being leaked, and bad people are out there trying to find ways to steal data. The web security oriented articles listed here provide information that may help you secure your site and its code from attacks and data theft.

Salesforce’s alternative is Einstein and Einstein Analytics, both of which offer prebuilt, CRM-embedded predictions and recommendations along with the ability to build AI apps and answer company-specific business questions without coding or data science expertise.

SDKs can serve a variety of purposes. There are SDKs for payment processing (such as Cardio, Paypal, Braintree, Stripe, Venmo) and SDKs for user login and authentication (such as Agilebits, Google SignIn, 1Password). Roughly half of the SDKs in apps are marketing and customer experience related, addressing needs such as analytics, attribution, A/B testing and user engagement. Marketing and customer experience services that are the focus of our Periodic Table.

A video explainer on the technology that’s changing the meaning of the human face.

A new image recognition algorithm uses the way humans see things for inspiration.The context: When humans look at a new image of something, we identify what it is based on a collection of recognizable features.

The best data labeling tools are intuitive, minimize human involvement, and maximize efficiency. This post showcases 8 tools to help label training data.

The Guide to Marketplaces compiles many of the insights we’ve learned from working with great marketplace companies and analyzing the industry.

A global survey on Enterprise Architecture. Topics include IT Complexity, the evolution and scope of current EA practices, and the tangible benefits of investing in higher EA maturity.

Technology performance has become critical to business success. Here’s how CEOs can lead technology transformations that support their companies' strategic priorities.

The context: The vast majority of Facebook’s moderation is now done automatically by the company’s machine-learning systems, reducing the amount of harrowing content its moderators have to review.

The internet has changed the way we work, interact and learn with others across the world. How many people in the world are online, and how has this changed over time? Explore global and country-level data on internet access and technology.

The Dark Web is real, and your information might be for sale there. Here’s what your data is worth. The simple answer is this: about $45. This is how much, on average, a full set of information for a credit card is selling for, including a name, SSN, birth date, and CVV.

How to get off of people search sites like Pipl, Spokeo, and WhitePages.

Global research highlights how AI is changing the relationship between people and technology at work.

Google Analytics may be the most important application to understand the behavior of your visitors. And whether you’re a beginner or an experienced user, there are many free resources to help. Here is a list of free tutorials for Google Analytics.

How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products. Smart home gadgets, fitness trackers, toys and more, rated for their privacy & security.

Curious to know what technologies are used on your competitor’s website?

As soon as the power turns on, hackers can gain an advantage.

you’ll learn about some of the expert roles that are often the hardest to find or are only required in specific situations. This paper details these roles, their responsibilities and the cross-functional processes that are required to successfully hunt for, respond to and prevent threats as part of a world-class security organization.

The retail industry is experiencing rapid disruption caused by new technologies and changing customer expectations. The purpose of this map is solution focused – to understand how to cope with the sector's major shifts and to provide key players with the tools to thrive throughout their transformation.

Compare the different marketing automation platforms in order to find out the most appropriate vendor for your business.

Le livre blanc, une initiative de l’industrie des technologies du Québec portée et mobilisée par TechnoMontréal vise à rassembler les nombreuses visées des acteurs de notre industrie sous une seule vision. C’est une démarche de consultation publique auprès de plus de 450 entreprises et organismes en technologies afin de les accompagner à mieux définir les besoins de l’industrie et à proposer des solutions concrètes pour influencer le développement proactif de stratégies numériques d’envergure!

We launched a new product portfolio as a series of specialized clouds: Acquia Drupal Cloud, Acquia Content Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. Each cloud is composed of a suite of products designed to help customers design, organize and execute solutions tailored to their needs, whether they’re a developer, digital marketer, content creator, IT professional or anyone else involved in shaping the digital ecosystem.

A leading Canadian grocer will pilot automated fulfillment of its buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) offering.

Loblaw Inc. is building an automated picking facility to support its PC Express BOPIS service. Leveraging a hyperlocal fulfillment solution from Takeoff Technologies that functions in compact vertical spaces, Loblaw will launch the 12,000-sq.-ft. facility inside one of its GTA Real Canadian superstores in 2020.

How will an economic downturn affect the digital services industry? Who will be a winner, and who will be a loser if economic growth stalls?

The home surveillance company owned by Amazon bragged on Instagram about taping millions of kids going door to door.

HoloBuilder, a construction technology that offers reality capture solutions for progress documentation and construction project management, has announced a unique partnership with Boston Dynamics that will bring HoloBuilder’s reality capture experience to a robotic platform. HoloBuilder’s new application, named SpotWalk, is a new product from HoloBuilder that integrates with Boston Dynamic’s “Spot” robot – a dog-sized quadrupedal robot designed to be able to nimbly navigate challenging environments, including stairs and uneven ground.

We've been working on isolating the 1,500 services that power Monzo. The sheer size and complexity of our platform made this difficult. But by protecting us against compromised services, it makes Monzo more secure. 

In the Security team at Monzo, one of our goals is to move towards a completely zero trust platform. This means that in theory, we'd be able to run malicious code inside our platform with no risk – the code wouldn't be able to interact with anything dangerous without the security team granting special access.

The idea is that we don't want to trust just anything simply because it's inside our platform. Instead, we want individual services to be trusted based on a short and deliberate list of which other services they're allowed to interact with. This makes an attack substantially more difficult.

DropShipping is a direct to consumer retail fulfilment method where a seller does not hold stock.

See below a chart comparing different out-of-stock solutions, their value proposition, challenges, benefits and costs to see how Focal's Shelf-Mounted Cameras stack up against the competition. 

The State of Automation 2019: RPA, Intelligent Automation, and AI Solutions for insights on how to evaluate your smart automation journey.

Audiences around the world are shifting their behaviors to be more mobile-oriented than ever before. But what are the underlying dynamics driving mobile media and app activity amongst consumers?

The most recent version of the dashboards and Business Intelligence tools list. Start here to understand the BI landscape, browse options and understand pricing.

A practical, expert-reviewed Guide to growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates.

Technology is the future of customer experience. These statistics show the grow of new technology and how it impacts everything about the future of customer experience.

When you know how to do a competitive analysis, you can create a more informed and effective marketing plan. Researching competitors in your industry helps you clearly see the competitive landscape, where your brand fits in it, and what you need to do to stand out and succeed.
The rest of this guide will walk you through the definition and benefits of a competitive analysis, show you how to do a competitive analysis, and share competitor analysis tools to help you along the way.

Our top ecommerce platforms are based on objective performance data, feature set and, value.

John Seabrook on how predictive-text technology could transform the future of the written word.

You open up a database of pictures used to train artificial intelligence systems. At first, things seem straightforward. You’re met with thousands of images: apples and oranges, birds, dogs, horses, mountains, clouds, houses, and street signs. But as you probe further into the dataset, people begin to appear: cheerleaders, scuba divers, welders, Boy Scouts, fire walkers, and flower girls. Things get strange: A photograph of a woman smiling in a bikini is labeled a “slattern, slut, slovenly woman, trollop.” A young man drinking beer is categorized as an “alcoholic, alky, dipsomaniac, boozer, lush, soaker, souse.” A child wearing sunglasses is classified as a “failure, loser, non-starter, unsuccessful person.” You’re looking at the “person” category in a dataset called ImageNet, one of the most widely used training sets for machine learning. 

Something is wrong with this picture. 

Where did these images come from? Why were the people in the photos labeled this way? What sorts of politics are at work when pictures are paired with labels, and what are the implications when they are used to train technical systems?

In short, how did we get here? 

This year, in 2019, companies and governments ramped up the rollout of facial recognition — in public housing, in hiring, and in city streets. The Symposium focused on the growing pushback to harmful forms of AI, inviting organizers, scholars, and lawyers onstage to discuss their work.

The MarTech marketplaces that RSG covers continue to evolve rapidly and have become more complex (with more overlaps!) this year. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) market is no different - with new vendors, more investment, emerging niches, and evolving use cases.

I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’s desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-It notes on every page, and every one of those notes has been turned into a team or a product.

This post will discuss the different architectures that have been prominent in previous years and how they’ve influenced the architecture of today. 

SketchAdapt, program-writing artificial intelligence system, learns how to compose short, high-level programs, while letting a second set of algorithms find the right sub-programs to fill in the details.

New research from Cass Business School has found that battery icons on mobile phones shape how people view time and space, and how battery conservation practices define user identities.

Common characteristics of microservice architectures that we saw in the field:
- Componentization via Services
- Organized around Business Capabilities
- Products not Projects
- Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
- Decentralized Governance
- Decentralized Data Management
- Infrastructure Automation
- Design for failure
- Evolutionary Design

Watch this webinar featuring Unity and special guests from Taqtile — Co-Founder & CTO John Tomizuka and VP Kelly Malone — to learn more about innovative AR and VR use cases across the industrial sector.

Get a copy of the playbook Leading Upskilling Initiatives in Data Science & Machine Learning, compliments of Dataiku.

We are in the midst of an open source renaissance. But how do you turn an open source project into a business? a16z's Peter Levine and Jennifer Li cover the complete go-to-market from community management to enterprise sales.

Institutions are crossing functional boundaries to enable collaborative resistance against financial cybercrime and fraud.

Maybe you didn't grow up dreaming of being an "augmented reality journey builder" or "master of edge computing" or a "cyber calamity forecaster." But someone will. Jobs of the future will be heavy on the use of algorithms, automation and AI; customer experience; environment; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transport; and work culture.

The A.I. Age | This 12-month series of stories explores the social and economic questions arising from the fast-spreading uses of artificial intelligence. The series is funded with the help of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. Seattle Times editors and reporters operate independently of our funders and maintain editorial control over the coverage.

TrainAR features include:

• Create, edit and deploy training modules quickly and easily
• Included templates implement best practices for world-class AR content creation
• Create modules for overviews, step-by-step lessons, and certification testing
• Set up new trainees, issue and manage digital certifications
• Real time data viewer tracks and displays key training metrics on the monitor
• Collect and retain detailed records of training experiences

McKinsey research shows that digitized incumbents win by addressing digital technology’s dual imperatives: building new digital businesses while transforming legacy operations.

A lot has changed since most brands first “hired” their DMP—GDPR, the rise of Walled Gardens, browser tracking preventions. Has your data strategy kept up?

The growing cyber skills shortage drives security organizations to look for ways to mitigate the pain and danger that short-staffed security teams can experience. In its report, Security Organization Dynamics, Gartner outlines this ongoing challenge and notes how, “Persistent security skills shortages have forced security leaders to explore new ways of obtaining and managing security capabilities.”

Gartner points out that hiring may not be the only option for filling the gap, cautioning that, “Few, if any, enterprises can afford to perform all security functions in-house. Consider selective outsourcing of functions, especially those that are operationalized or ad hoc.”

Although writing code once sounds like a great bargain, the associated overhead made the cost of this approach outweigh the benefits (which turned out to be smaller than expected anyway). In the end we no longer share mobile code via C++ (or any other non-standard way) and instead write code in the platform native languages.
In addition we want our engineers to have a delightful experience and to be able to contribute back to the community. This is why we made the decision to align our practices with industry standards.

(This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review )

AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. It often produces a result that’s like combining a floor wax and dessert topping.

What the Amazon founder and CEO wants for his empire and himself, and what that means for the rest of us.

There is a lack of clarity of details surrounding Amazon’s upcoming development of a food-store format that will be entirely distinct from its Whole Foods stores.

Martech: 2020 and Beyond, a new report collaboratively produced by BDO, WARC, and the University of Bristol, estimates that the worldwide spend on marketing technology is $121.5 billion.

À quel point l’âge, le revenu, le genre ou la religion influencent les chances de voter pour un parti? Nous avons puisé dans les réponses de 387 671 utilisateurs de la Boussole électorale pour le déterminer.

In the last 5-6 years, machine learning has gone from ‘crazy idea from the 1980s’ to ‘software’. That has come with several waves of deployment and several waves of company creation, as we work out what do do with it. It’s the new SQL.

Credential abuse and botnets abusing retailer inventories is a rising problem that needs attention. On average, organizations report experiencing 12.7 credential stuffing attempts each month, with each attempt targeting 1,252 accounts. We detected nearly 28 billion credential stuffing attempts between May and December 2018. Within the retail industry, the apparel vertical, experienced 3.7 billion attempts on its own, making it the largest targeted industry during the same timeframe. So why is retail, as well as apparel, such at hot target? Short answer? Money.

Must-do's in order for your hires to reach their full potential you need to put a structure in place that encourages and nurtures their growth, both technically and as managers and leaders.

On earth and in space, there are almost no unexplored regions. But a new atlas of blank spaces is emerging, which will enable an age of astonishing discovery.

What is wafer-scale integration? A wafer is a circle, today about 12 inches in diameter. A chip is typically a square no more than an inch on a side — much smaller than a wafer. Many copies of the same chip are printed onto the wafer. They are arranged into a grid with spaces called scribe lines between them. The wafer is then cut along those scribe lines into individual chips. The chips are tested, and after any defective ones are discarded, the rest can be packaged and sold. Wafer-scale integration is the idea that you make a single chip out of the whole wafer. You skip the step above concerning cutting the wafer up — with one chip there is nothing to cut.

The WSE (pronounced “wise”) is the largest commercial chip ever manufactured, built to solve the problem of deep learning compute. The WSE is 1.2 trillion transistors, packed onto a single 215mm x 215mm chip with 400,000 AI-optimized cores, connected by a 100Pbit/s interconnect. The cores are fed by 18 GB of super-fast, on-chip memory, with an unprecedented 9 PB/s of memory bandwidth.

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today — and it is a doozy.

Most brands must improve the customer experience for omnichannel service--and this has less to do with tech than many think.

I've been doing digital audits, readiness assessments and due diligence for the past 20 years and I've identified 5 reasons that should always trigger them.

Use the 2019 Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising to prioritize your marketing technology investments.

Marketers who adopt a portfolio management approach to marketing technology investments can better serve the business and stay on top of tech needs and obsolescence.

There are millions of surveillance cameras in the U.S., but not nearly enough eyes to watch them all. When you pass one on the street, you can rightly expect your actions to go unnoticed in the moment; footage is instead archived for review if something goes wrong.

These five strategies have been successfully adopted by global leaders like Audi, Philips, and Spotify, and your company can replicate them, too. Download Five Building Blocks to Digital Transformation from MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (MIT CISR) to learn how.

Google is working on a new app for its Pixel smartphones that will use hardware sensors to detect an auto accident and automatically call emergency services if a person fails to respond.

Brands and retailers are moving quickly to provide more seamless omnichannel shopping experiences--but your customers are moving faster.

What’s next for retail tech? We examined 21 of the biggest retail trends to watch this year, ranging from automated checkout to inventory management.

AWS offers the only cloud born from retail and built for retailers. We share Amazon’s own tested, proven innovation to help retailers reinvent their legacy applications for new value, complete their view of customers for relevant insight, and transform their engagement for increased sales velocity – a head start 20 years in the making to lead their customer’s journey.

AI can flag people based on their clothing or behavior, identify people's emotions, and find people who are acting "unusual."

Global companies, like Amazon, Coca Cola or Zalando are transforming their IT infrastructures into a microservice architecture. In addition to this, they are rebuilding their internal organizational structures and pushing their businesses ahead of the competition. We take a closer look at examples of microservice architecture in eCommerce.

Implementing PIM solutions into existing B2B solutions can be extremely complex. It requires a great number of custom-made solutions, adjusting to specific business requirements, and matching the company’s structure. Here’s what we see as the biggest challenges, and how we overcame them!

Boston Dynamics only has 20 of the robots available right now, but it’s hoping to manufacture about 1,000 for use out in the field. So it has to be very choosy about who gets one. It hasn’t disclosed how much they will cost.

We asked 10K experts about 70 the most popular trends in eCommerce industry

CMOs are placing big bets that personalization will break through all the noise and clutter of branded messaging. Most CMOs either have ambitious investment plans or are already spending on personalization-related tech and data platforms and staff. Yet, some do not realize that if done incorrectly, personalization attempts can alienate customers and fail to achieve desired returns. This webinar, Gartner reveals how brands are rethinking personalization to achieve far better business results.

Get five best practices for developing an omni-channel approach to personalized marketing, and discover the solutions that make it possible to deliver automated recommendations, across channels, to connect with customers. 

Digital business transformation trailblazers who are actively promoting the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) clearly need to be better at communicating, separating fact from science fiction. AI business champions must keep it real and stay focused on tangible business value. A data analytics, big data and AI pioneer shares how business leaders can effectively advocate for AI.

Inovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—"invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again"—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.

Gartner research has uncovered five ways a consumer can perceive a brand’s personalized message as helpful:
“Make it Easy” – The message made it easier to get through the purchase.
“Reassure Me” – The message made me less anxious about making the wrong decision.
“Teach Me Something New” – The message helped me understand how to better use a product I purchased.
“Direct Me” – The message guided me to a product/service that would solve a problem for me.
“Reward Me” – The message provided me with exclusive benefits.

We are going to have a look at the vital steps you have to take before submitting your item to a digital marketplace. As well as the vital marketing strategies that will help you achieve your first 100 sales. In this article we use our own marketplace, Codester, as an example. 

By rolling out a device equipped with more advanced facial recognition technology, users can enjoy an even more convenient method of paying for goods and services without using smartphones. The Frog Pro features a 10.1-inch double-sided screen, a 3D depth-sensing camera for the facial recognition payment function and a QR code scanner

RPA is a software robot that mimics human actions, whereas AI is the simulation of human intelligence by machines. Many people often asked about the difference between Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some even confused the two to be the same.
To make matters worse, many vendors are now brandying about terms like Intelligent Automation (IA) or Intelligence Process Automation (IPA). For the uninitiated, all these jargon can be very confusing, and perhaps daunting. To help you out, we have put together this blog post to highlight the key differences between RPA and AI, particularly in the context of process automation.

Each year, we identify the top trends in SaaS spend and usage. This report takes a look at 2018 data from nearly a thousand companies and trends for 2019.

An update on HubSpot App partners and integrations in 2019.

We worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they contain bad data and we worry what bad people might do with them.

My favourite example of what can go wrong here comes from a project for recognising cancer in photos of skin. The obvious problem is that you might not have an appropriate distribution of samples of skin in different tones. But another problem that can arise is that dermatologists tend to put rulers in the photo of cancer, for scale - so if all the examples of ‘cancer’ have a ruler and all the examples of ‘not-cancer’ do not, that might be a lot more statistically prominent than those small blemishes. You inadvertently built a ruler-recogniser instead of a cancer-recogniser.

The structural thing to understand here is that the system has no understanding of what it’s looking at - it has no concept of skin or cancer or colour or gender or people or even images. It doesn’t know what these things are any more than a washing machine knows what clothes are. It’s just doing a statistical comparison of data sets. So, again - what is your data set? How is it selected? What might be in it that you don’t notice - even if you’re looking? How might different human groups be represented in misleading ways? And what might be in your data that has nothing to do with people and no predictive value, yet affects the result? Are all your ‘healthy’ photos taken under incandescent light and all your ‘unhealthy’ pictures taken under LED light? You might not be able to tell, but the computer will be using that as a signal.

Bien que l'intelligence artificielle est sur toutes les lèvres, très peu de gestionnaires sont familiers avec les différentes applications qu'offrent l'IA et surtout, comment concrètement l'implanter au sein de leur organisation. C'est ce que nous tenterons de démystifier dans ce webinaire qui portera sur les différentes étapes d'une transformation digitale. Joignez-vous à nous pour savoir;

• Par où commencer ?
• Les questions à se poser
• Comment faire l'état des lieux
• Quels acteurs impliquer
• Comment éviter le ''trip'' technologique

By 2020, Gartner has predicted that more than 60% of online sellers will adopt a marketplace or include third-party sellers in their eCommerce ecosystems. Marketplaces are one of the platform model types that are transforming every industry.

The platform model brings buyers and sellers together, helping businesses deliver a better customer experience while gathering customer insights. Data from McKinsey shows that companies that platform grow, and companies that don't platform don't grow.

But where do you begin? Our guide will teach you how to define your platform strategy and get started.

Read the eBook to learn:

- The different types of platform models, and which are best suited for your business
- Platform Pioneer stories, including how Best Buy became the most trafficked retailer in Canada
- The first steps you should take to kickstart your business’ platform revolution

New forms of automation (e.g., robotic process automation) and knowledge of the underlying processes/interactions are key to digital transformation. Process mining helps enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders assess operations and performance, increasing these initiatives’ value.

Succeeding is no longer just about who’s able to build the technology, or who’s first to market. It’s about who’s got the best experience.

This chart shows the cloud infrastructure services market worldwide from Q1 2016 to Q2 2019.

We teamed up with researchers from New York University and the University of California, San Diego to find out just how effective basic account hygiene is at preventing hijacking. The year-long study, on wide-scale attacks and targeted attacks, was presented on Wednesday at a gathering of experts, policy makers, and users called The Web Conference.
Our research shows that simply adding a recovery phone number to your Google Account can block up to 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks, and 66% of targeted attacks that occurred during our investigation.

Retailers that try to take Amazon head-on will fail - unless they’re willing to dedicate nearly a decade to invest in their distribution networks while maintaining the volume needed to support those investments. The only link in the chain that Amazon has yet to completely integrate is manufacturing. However, that space could be next on the horizon as it’s already begun to push private label products across many categories.

An AIOPS platform in its simplest avatar helps aggregate and make sense of disparate data sources, identify the link and interrelationships between different silos. The term AIOPS was coined by Gartner and it was the acronym used for Algorithmic IT Operations back in the day. It was used to represent solutions that used machine-learning algorithms to solve unknown IT problems and intelligently predict and automate execution of ITOPS jobs. AIOPS has grown immensely over the past few years, with many vendors providing their own implementation of this concept. Gartner currently redefines this term as “Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations.”

Your web browsing history is the most lucrative piece of information that can be traded.

Brands and retailers are moving quickly to provide more seamless omnichannel shopping experiences--but your customers are moving faster.

Leading CMOs make measurement the centerpiece of their growth strategy.

Advertisers that raise their digital game report cost savings of up to 30% and revenue increases of as much as 20%.

The number of marketing technologies available to businesses has soared in the last five years – from about 150 in 2011 to over 3,800 in 2016, according to ChiefMarTech.com. And a study by eConsultancy and Tealium found that businesses use on average more than 20 marketing technology vendors to deliver their campaigns and customer experiences. This rapid expansion of the MarTech space has created significant challenges for marketing, technology, and management teams alike making it difficult to build cohesive, end-to-end customer experiences because of gaps between marketing technologies, the data they leverage, and how they are implemented. This paper provides an overview of the four core problems businesses are facing with data due to the proliferation of marketing technology, and how adopting a Universal Data Hub (UDH) solves these problems. 

Content needs to reach the right people at the right time to be impactful - here we break down every funnel stage and the content that goes with it!

Machine learning continues to gain traction in digital businesses, and technical professionals must embrace it as a tool for creating operational efficiencies. This updated primer discusses the benefits and pitfalls of machine learning, architecture updates, and new roles and responsibilities.

It’s where forward-thinking managers should be focusing.

1. First, catalogue your business processes. 
2. Second, focus on simple problems. 
3. Third, don’t use machine learning where standard business logic will suffice.
4. Fourth, if a process is complicated, use machine learning to create decision support systems.

Hack, nudge and prod employees to alleviate unfocused, stagnant transformation.

Digital business is accelerating interest in artificial intelligence (AI) at a pace that has left many CIOs hurrying to build an AI strategy and investment plan appropriate for their enterprise.  
CIOs are in the perfect position to educate their company’s CEO and board about recent developments in artificial intelligence and show how AI might influence their business and competitive landscape. 
Gartner’s e-book provides actionable insights and advice to create and implement a plan for artificial intelligence in the enterprise, make the business case to the c-suite and the board, and build the right AI data. 

By now you understand that AI is mainstream. We carry it around in our phones, it’s installed in our automobiles and household appliances. But how should you be thinking about using AI in your business? Start by considering the data managed by your company. What can your data teach you about your business? What can you automate or streamline using your data? If there are repetitive processes in your business, AI can be used to automate those processes.
For example, if you have large customer data sets, it is likely you can use machine learning to let the data tell you more about those customers, give you intelligent insights that will help you to create a more customer focused offering. Examples: Retail banks use AI to offer appropriate banking products tailored for individual customers. Insurance companies use AI to verify identity, assess risk profiles and recommend coverage. Companies are using ML to sort though massive resumes to find the best matches for new employees.

Companies transforming to become customer-obsessed are using customer journey analytics to help them become customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected, and to ultimately be more effective in acquiring, serving and retaining customers.  

This report from leading global research and advisory firm, Forrester, identifies the 12 most significant customer journey analytics platform providers today, and reveals how each measures up based on 26 different evaluation criteria, to help you make the right choice for your organization. You'll get a complete overview of the current customer journey analytics market, including;

• The two primary journey analytics provider categories, visioning and orchestration, and four core capabilities: (1) data fusion, (2) journey design & planning, (3) journey testing & optimization, and (4) journey automation & orchestration
• The 2018 Forrester Wave Journey Visioning Platform rankings and scorecard
• A breakdown of each journey analytics provider’s offering, strengths, specialties, and customer base
• Key criteria that helps leaders stand out from the pack

As the war for digital talent intensifies, what must your organization do to future proof your workforce?

Machine Learning (ML) is a new field, and there is a competitive advantage to those first adopters. Yet, many companies are buying ML technologies and developing strategies before they have taken the appropriate step back to evaluate whether their dat

UC Berkeley Executive Education's Digital Transformation online program. Leading people, data, and technology for the digital economy.

Customers expect a personalized shopping experience. All retailers—even leaders—must advance their capabilities to deliver it.

Customers expect a personalized shopping experience. All retailers—even leaders—must advance their capabilities to deliver it.

Technology is changing the face of the energy industry. Communities are using blockchain to sell solar power to each other. Big oil and gas companies are using artificial intelligence to map out potential extraction points. Disaster zones and emerging markets are moving directly to microgrids and away from centralized grid models.

In this briefing, we cover:

• Major corporates that are backing blockchain technology to improve energy transactions, like Siemens, which has partnered with LO3 to launch the Brooklyn Microgrid
• The implications of startups like Bidgley that are helping utilities disaggregate the massive deluge of data that has come from a new wave of connected devices
• The role that artificial intelligence can play in the industry, from making grids smarter and more responsive to improving storage efficiency
• What a sturdy cybersecurity offering might look like in the energy industry

Robots are joining the workforce around the world. And their impact on jobs is inevitable.

The predictions can sound apocalyptic: millions and millions of jobs destroyed by automation, an entire working generation replaced at a stroke. But the actual number of jobs affected—while alarming—shouldn’t really be the entire focus of the conversation. The debate needs to shift. Yes, we know the robots are coming—so what are we going to do about it?

Shared mobility services are more convenient — and in some cases, more affordable — than owning a car. We break down a number of these emerging modes of transport by trip length.
Personal car ownership isn’t dead yet.
That said, as cities in the US grow more congested, public transportation systems are failing and traffic is worsening, all of which is making quick and efficient transport more difficult.

What’s next for wellness? Our analysts identified 18 of the biggest wellness trends to watch in 2019, from wellness tourism to boutique meditation.

Here's my conversation with George Hotz (@realGeorgeHotz), founder of @comma_ai and an outspoken personality in the tech world.

The main problem with platforms is that many customers simply don't have the human, organizational, and financial resources to exploit them properly

Now is the time to empower effective change in your business. Eighty-eight percent of shoppers say they rely on digital product content to decide where to buy. The technology systems of the past cannot keep pace with the detailed, personalized, and contextualized experience consumers demand. The role of information technology is undergoing significant shifts.
This ebook outlines a new approach to product information management: combing true agility and necessary data governance. Product data is a key component of the consumer experience. Static data will leave your business behind in the emerging market of tomorrow. To adapt to digital commerce, businesses must re-evaluate their current ecosystems and update their approach to product information management.
- How to balance the increasing need for both data quality and data agility
- The technology required to drive internal efficiency and grow sales and market share on the digital shelf
- A step-by-step process to empower business users without sacrificing data governance
- A set of questions to help assess whether your organization’s needs will be met by any new system

Google’s revenue growth — with advertising at its core — is only as strong as the world’s access to its products. Today, it’s estimated that less than 55% of the world has access to reliable, high-speed internet. For this reason, Google has become increasingly focused on improving connectivity. The company is partnering and competing as it works toward global, ubiquitous internet access.
In this research briefing, we analyze 8 initiatives by Google and the broader Alphabet organization — each helping to extend the company’s reach. We dig into patents, earnings calls, private market data, and more to understand Google’s strategy across these areas, including:
Fiber Optics & Fixed Wireless Internet Services
Cellular Service & Connectivity
Live, Online Television
Cloud Computing
Public WiFi

Agile Practice Guide provides tools, situational guidelines, and an understanding of the various Agile approaches available to enable better results. It is especially useful for project managers accustomed to a more traditional environment to adapt to a more Agile approach. The Agile Practice Guide contains the following sections:
- An Introduction to Agile describes the Agile Manifesto mindset, values, and principles. It also covers the concepts of definable and high-uncertainty work, and the correlation between the Lean, Kanban, and Agile approaches.
- Life Cycle Selection introduces the various life cycles discussed in the practice guide and covers suitability filters, tailoring guidelines, and common combinations of approaches.
- Implementing Agile: Creating an Agile Environment talks about critical factors to consider when creating an Agile environment such as servant leadership and team composition.
- Implementing Agile: Delivering in an Agile Environment discusses how to organize a team and common practices the team can use for delivering value on a regular basis. It provides examples of empirical measurements for the team and for reporting status.
- Organizational Considerations for Project Agility explores organizational factors that impact the use of Agile practices, such as culture, readiness, business practices, and the role of a project management office (PMO).

Check out 12 Google Sheet add-ons that can streamline your entire reporting process, collect data and predictions, and even send emails. Google Sheets can be used for a lot more than just storing and organizing your data.

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn humans into its pets. Here's how Musk's companies are actually taking on virtually every industry.

IoT has been and will be the talk of the town for many years to come. Learn the latest internet of things statistics, forecasts and facts for 2019.

The IoT is defined by everyday objects, interconnected via the internet in order to send and receive data. The reason why we connect these objects is simple: for convenience. To help you understand this technology better in 2019, we’ve created the following list of Internet of Things statistics.

Being able to arm your security system remotely, or start your washer, turn your lights on or off, or adjust the thermostat while being nowhere near them is a convenience our grandparents fantasized about. Looks like we will probably never have to worry about leaving the stove on again.

In this article, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of coupled, decoupled, headless, and hybrid CMS architecture.

In mature markets like Web Content Management, there is almost always a single proprietary leader and a single Open Source leader. There is Oracle and MongoDB. Splunk and Elastic. VMWare and Docker. Gitlab and Github. That is why I believe that next year it will be Acquia and Adobe at the very top of the WCM Magic Quadrant. Sitecore and Episerver will continue to fight for third place among companies who prefer a Microsoft-centric approach. I was not surprised to see Sitecore move down this year as they work to overcome technical product debt and cloud transition, leading to strange decisions like acquiring a services company.

It remains unclear how a commercial software vendor like Adobe will cultivate the community and whether the ecosystem in turn will embrace Adobe. 

• Content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management
• Repositories that organize and provide metadata about content
• Library services, such as check-in/check-out, version control and security
• Website management features, such as layout, menus and navigation
• Content deployment functions
• Personalization and analytics capabilities
• The ability to integrate well, via APIs, with adjacent technologies such as digital commerce platforms, social media platforms, marketing automation platforms and broader digital experience platforms (DXPs)
• Hybrid (traditional and headless) and pure headless capabilities for API-driven omnichannel content delivery

We applied the editing-publishing separation
pattern in building a two-stack CMS to support a global
readership while supporting complex coordination of legacy
editing tools. 

When content volume is low and only few trained people are responsible for content creation and maintenance, any added complexity of a two stack CMS isn't worthwhile. Such complexity makes it harder for content creators to learn how to use it and adds significant effort in system maintenance. (Although this may be mitigated by tools that are designed to work in this style.)

Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Salsify’s Product Experience Management (PXM) Platform.

The technologies on the list, which is curated by members of the Forum’s Expert Network, are selected against a number of criteria. In addition to promising major benefits to societies and economies, they must also be disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to have achieved considerable scale within five years.

When it comes to specific start-up sub-sector leadership, we see Montreal emerge as one of the global hotspots for artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups. Since 2016, more than $1 billion has been invested in AI companies located there (including notable startup Element AI), and it has the largest concentration of AI academic researchers in the world. Montreal also hosts the NeurIPS conference, the largest AI event held annually in the world.

Gartner has recently started talking about a new integration technology called the “event broker”.  As you may have guessed from the name ;), it’s a category of brokers and streaming technologies that move and govern events across applications, devices and processes.

On average, in the US, using those three records, you could be correctly located in an “anonymized” database 81% of the time. Given 15 demographic attributes of someone living in Massachusetts, there’s a 99.98% chance you could find that person in any anonymized database.

Focusing on business processes can lead companies to end up with multiple systems that perform similar functions, such as customer-relationship management. Concentrating too much on technology can cause EA teams to organize their work around building applications rather than enabling the business.

In our 35-criterion evaluation of enterprise architecture management suites (EAMS) providers, we identified the 12 most significant ones — Ardoq, Atoll Technologies, Avolution, BiZZdesign, BOC Group, LeanIX, MEGA International, Orbus Software, Planview, QPR Software, Software AG, and UNICOM Systems — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps enterprise architecture (EA) professionals select the right one for their needs.

Machine learning is the process of a machine attempting to accomplish a task, independent of human intervention, more efficiently and more effectively with every passing attempt i.e learning phase.

In the quest for coherent responses to a digitizing world, companies must assess how far digitization has progressed along multiple dimensions in their industries and the impact that this evolution is having—and will have—on economic performance. And they must act on each of these dimensions with bold, tightly integrated strategies. Only then will their investments match the context in which they compete.

Computer vision turns imaging into a universal input - it lets computer see. So what kinds of things will become vision problems, and how does that change Google or Instagram?

Strategy, culture, and customer experience are just as important.

One former employee claims it’s one of the most expensive research and development projects in the company’s history, though Kumar disputes that, saying the stores use off-the-shelf hardware and Amazon’s existing cloud computing infrastructure. Still, considering the dense placement of cameras and sensors, and the tech-support crews that are on call at all hours of the week, it’s much more expensive than running, say, a 7-Eleven, which could be staffed by a single cashier and—with the possible exception of the Slurpee machine—have little in the way of bespoke technology.

Learn how people like Bill Nye, Shaun White, and Charli Marie have built memorable, effective personal brands.

Recipes demonstrating cloud-based image and video manipulation and upload using Cloudinary. Sample image and video manipulation URLs and code snippets from multiple frameworks.

The world"s biggest compilation of resources that can help you learn image and video management for web and mobile apps.

Want to beef up your security online? Use these five cybersecurity practices to keep your data, banking, and personal information safe. Take control today!

Le CEFRIO a voulu par cette recherche brosser un portrait de la situation québécoise actuelle en matière de commerce électronique alimentaire, et ce, dans le contexte où les grands détaillants annoncent des investissements importants pour mettre en place la distribution de leurs produits achetés en ligne.

2019 is shaping up to be a landmark year for the retail and ecommerce industries. Online spending continues to grow, retailers are experimenting with new voice technology, and an abbreviated holiday shopping season looms on the horizon. We invite you to join us on July 17, 2019 for our annua

All jobs below C-suite level are to be reclassified. All those impacted will no longer be employees of IIM. Instead you will work for IIM on a contract basis. This change sounds scarier than it really is. It holds great benefits both for you and for IIM. The company will be able to respond more nimbly to a rapidly changing marketplace. We hope that you will continue to perform services for IIM on a contract basis, but you will also have the opportunity to work and earn elsewhere. If you have any questions, please ask Irma, our human-resources chatbot.

As the retail industry continues to be disrupted by emerging technologies and shifting consumer behavior, how do you keep up? One of the first steps is to keep up to date with the latest innovations and trends that will transform how you start, market, manage, and grow your business in 2019 and beyond.

We’ve put together a list of our favorite retail blogs on the internet and outlined the subjects each of them covers. We’ve selected blogs based on their industry expertise, the volume of content they publish, and how actionable their content is.

The 15 best retail blogs that every retailer needs to add to their reading list. Convince and convert. Retail Dive. Insider Trends. Retail Wire. Harvard Business Review. TechCrunch. Lightspeed Blog. The Retail Doctor. The National Retail Federation. Medallion Retail. Forrester Retail. Hubspot Blog. Retail Design Blog. Neil Patel Blog.

Is this 1999?  It sure feels like it...

It seems to us that profitless companies seem to be back in vogue. Recently, companies like Uber and Lyft have gone public with very disruptive business models but no profit in sight. At best, profit might come a long way down the road. Yet they are given market valuations at levels that suggest a wildly profitable business model.

By using feature inversion to visualize millions of activations from an image classification network, we create an explorable activation atlas of features the network has learned which can reveal how the network typically represents some concepts.

L'Oréal is bringing its artificial intelligence (AI) technology to Amazon, which for the first time will give its mobile shoppers a chance to virtually try on makeup before buying. ModiFace, the developer of technology for the beauty industry that L'Oréal acquired last year, is providing digital demonstrations of lipstick shades using augmented reality (AR), according to a company announcement.

Finding shabby abodes like these and making them respectable is the load-bearing wall of Amherst’s strategy. Amherst depends on humans to find cities, towns, and neighborhoods where fixer-uppers can become profitable, then relies on automation to pick individual homes. Negri, 31, heads the human team. He spends 150 days a year on the road overseeing Main Street ­Renewal’s operations from Atlanta to Denver, searching for “sweet spot” neighborhoods that combine affordable rents with a strong middle-income employment base.

How do the best performers increase their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts? The value of design comes from top management rigor, company-wide teamwork, rapid iteration, and relentless user-centricity.

This post focuses on one important aspect of  the machine learning at Linkedin’s feed: candidate selection. Before final fine feed ranking, a personalized candidate generation algorithm is applied to tens of thousands of feed updates to select a diverse and unique candidate pool. We describe the machine learning models applied in candidate generation and the infrastructure capabilities that support accurate and agile model iterations.

At Amazon, inventors are patenting their ideas and seeing their inventions come to life.

Learn to maximize your use of Google Cloud by adopting a cloud-native architecture.

Amherst Holdings CEO Sean Dobson made a fortune in the housing crash. Now he's profiting from properties that most investors wouldn’t touch.

In the near future, all media buying will be automated. Being good at buying media will no longer be a competitive advantage.

Based on my research and work I’m doing with some of the top CMOs in the world, here are my bold predictions for what advertising will look like in Canada by 2025:

The retail industry is rewriting the laws of physics. Change is coming at an ever faster rate each year and 2030 will be upon us before we know it. Explore the world in 2030 and the future of retail 2030.  

The technology to unlock the value of personalization at scale is readily available, and you may be surprised how much of it you already have in place. You don’t need to tackle everything at once. Develop a road map with regular stage gates to evaluate platform progress based on the trade-off between value at stake and ease of implementation. Identify and prioritize quick wins that make it easy for the organization to continue funding the transformation.

Personalization at scale relies on an organization’s ability to orchestrate the 4Ds—Data, Decisioning, Design, and Distribution. Addressing the technology in each of these Ds is the key to unlocking the full power of personalization.

Personalization is a crucial weapon in the marketer’s arsenal to achieve that goal. That’s how businesses can deliver tailored recommendations, content, offers, and experiences, across all channels and devices, along the entire customer journey. Personalization at scale has the potential to create $1.7 trillion to $3 trillion in new value (Exhibit 1). Capturing this value will require mastering the technologies and addressing the organizational disconnects—all while forging trust with customers and protecting their data.

Legacy structures and operations are keeping companies from taking full advantage of technology to modernize marketing.

For the 5th year, we've run The Stackies Awards, where marketers send in a single slide that illustrates their 'stack' — the collection of marketing technology tools they use and how they conceptualize them together. We received 48 entries this year, and some truly incredible ones. Airstack graciously sponsored the awards this time. And, as promised, we've gladly made a donation of $4,800 to Girls Who Code on behalf of the 48 entrants ABinBev, Airstream, Alliant Credit Union, Artemis Health, BraunAbility, Esri, G Adventures, Juniper Networks, Lola, Nationwide Advisory Solutions, Paychex, Racing Post, Sargento Foods, The Telegraph, Tennant, and the

Robo-cars are picking up everything its sensors see, hear, and detect. So to corral all this information, Cruise — through a hackathon event — created an open-source data visualization platform called Webviz. Other autonomous vehicle companies offer different aspects of the self-driving process, like Baidu's Apollo open-source autonomous driving platform. Now Cruise is opening up its application for anyone who works with robotics.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is interacting with other socio-economic and demographic factors to create a perfect storm of business model change in all industries, resulting in major disruptions to labour markets. New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is interacting with other socio-economic and demographic factors to create a perfect storm of business model change in all industries, resulting in major disruptions to labour markets. New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is interacting with other socio-economic and demographic factors to create a perfect storm of business model change in all industries, resulting in major disruptions to labour markets. New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others.

As Bill Murray would have said in Groundhog Day, 'Well, it's martech landscape day... again.' It has become an annual tradition at our spring MarTech conference to release an updated version of maybe the most infamous slide in marketing: the marketing technology landscape. We're keeping that custom alive this year again. What a crazy graphic! We nicknamed it the 'Martech 5000' a couple of years ago. While I like the ring of that — kinda rhymes with the Fortune 500 and the Inc. 5000 — it's a misnomer. Last year's landscape already exceeded 6,829 solutions. We're now up to 7,040 solutions

This report presents LibraBFT, a robust and efficient state machine replication system designed for the Libra Blockchain. LibraBFT is based on HotStuff, a recent protocol that leverages several decades of scientific advances in Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) and achieves the strong scalability and security properties required by internet settings. LibraBFT further refines the HotStuff protocol to introduce explicit liveness mechanisms and provides a concrete latency analysis. To drive the integration with the Libra Blockchain, this document provides specifications extracted from a fully-functional simulator. These specifications include state replication interfaces and a communication framework for data transfer and state synchronization among participants. Finally, this report provides a formal safety proof that induces criteria to detect misbehavior of BFT nodes, coupled with a simple reward and punishment mechanism.

We present Move, a safe and flexible programming language for the Libra Blockchain. Move is an executable bytecode language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. The key feature of Move is the ability to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic: a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations. These safety guarantees are enforced statically by Move’s type system. Despite these special protections, resources are ordinary program values — they can be stored in data structures, passed as arguments to procedures, and so on. First-class resources are a very general concept that programmers can use not only to implement safe digital assets but also to write correct business logic for wrapping assets and enforcing access control policies. The safety and expressivity of Move have enabled us to implement significant parts of the Libra protocol in Move, including Libra coin, transaction processing, and validator management.

The Libra Blockchain is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support a low-volatility cryptocurrency that will have the ability to serve as an efficient medium of exchange for billions of people around the world. We present a proposal for the Libra protocol, which implements the Libra Blockchain and aims to create a financial infrastructure that can foster innovation, lower barriers to entry, and improve access to financial services. To validate the design of the Libra protocol, we have built an open-source prototype implementation — Libra Core — in anticipation of a global collaborative effort to advance this new ecosystem.

To get a deeper understanding of the lifecycle of a Libra transaction, we will follow a transaction on its journey from being submitted to a Libra validator to being committed to the Libra Blockchain. We will then “zoom-in” on each logical component of a validator and take a look at its interactions with other components.

Open source software (OSS) is becoming increasingly popular, but gaining insight into its structural quality and understanding post-integration implications remain major challenges. This research digs deeper into these issues and aims to provide Software Intelligence on the structural quality of OSS commonly used by businesses or embedded as part of bespoke systems.

FedEx plans to deliver packages seven days a week starting next January as it tries to keep up with the continuing boom in online shopping. The company is also taking back nearly 2 million...

One way to avoid fly-by architecture is to have a set of principles that are generally accepted, which become the anchor for discussion as well as learning path for budding architects.

Amazon’s business model for the device is to make deliveries within 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) from a company warehouse and to reach customers within 30 minutes. It can carry packages weighing as much as five pounds. More than 80% of packages sold by the retail behemoth are within that weight limit, Kimchi said.

Marketing leaders must boost scale, relevance and return on content marketing investments. To meet these needs, content marketing platform vendors provide ideation, editorial planning, content sourcing and analysis capabilities. Use this research to find a CMP that drives efficiency and results.

Marketing has been on the front lines of the digital revolution, but the landscape has become much more complicated, requiring a focus on marketing-growth strategy, data, and new modes of creativity

Here are all the slides, plus analysis from Recode.

Fortune summary: tech firms are focusing on privacy; more people are using images to communicate; Twitter and Amazon are making small in-roads into the Facebook-Google ad duopoly; 51% of the world's population is now online.

US corporates are currently using facial recognition for everything from fast food orders to trying on makeup to issuing life insurance policies, and more.

​As technology transforms how business is done, innovation has become a strategic imperative. CIOs can play a leading role in driving and industrializing technology-led innovation.

Our tech columnist listened to four years of his Alexa archive, and discovered Amazon tracks us in more ways than we might want.

Our tech columnist offers some practical advice for fighting back against iOS apps hungry for your personal data.

The open source list of trackers that powers our browser extensions, Firefox’s private browsing mode, and other popular privacy tools can be found here along with a change log and notes.

We ran a privacy experiment to see how many hidden trackers are running from the apps on our iPhone. The tally is astounding. Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week.

Since 1999, Amazon's disruptive bravado has made “getting Amazoned” a fear for executives in any sector the tech giant sets its sights on.

The 4 industries Amazon will disrupt in the next 5 years

1. Pharmacies: Making drugs a low-margin commodity
2. Small business lending: A direct, data-driven source of financing
3. Online groceries: Faster delivery and better logistics
4. Payments: Giving small merchants a cheaper option

The 3 industries Amazon could go after next

1. Mortgages: Owning the distribution end
2. Home & garden: Capitalizing on supply chain expertise
3. Insurance: Bundling value into the shopping experience

LUMA is the leading investment bank focused on digital media and marketing. We provide strategic advice, proven M&A expertise, and extensive industry knowledge to optimize outcomes for our clients.

64% of sellers make more than half of their total e-commerce revenue from Amazon. More and more sellers are placing Amazon at the center of their online strategies, noting the ROI and access to a wide consumer base it provides.

In Tetlock’s 20-year study, both the broad foxes and the narrow hedgehogs were quick to let a successful prediction reinforce their beliefs. But when an outcome took them by surprise, foxes were much more likely to adjust their ideas. Hedgehogs barely budged. Some made authoritative predictions that turned out to be wildly wrong—then updated their theories in the wrong direction. They became even more convinced of the original beliefs that had led them astray. The best forecasters, by contrast, view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. This is called, in a word, learning.

We grouped the most common mistakes into four categories: (1) mispricing on one side of the market, (2) failure to develop trust with users and partners, (3) prematurely dismissing the competition, and (4) entering too late.

New York City did not have reliable digital data on medallion sales, so I used paper records to build a database of all the 10,888 sales between 1995 and 2018. The city taxi commission had never analyzed the financial records submitted by medallion buyers, so I did. Nobody knew how many medallion owners had gone bankrupt because of the crisis, so I convinced my boss to pay a technology company, Epiq, to create a program that sped through court records and spat out a tentative list — and then two news assistants helped me verify every result.

A look at how our product marketing teams have evolved as we've grown in order to optimize our setup and grow our products.

These are the top 10 skills you will need in the workplace in 2020.

Brick-and-mortar retail stores need to up their game. Technology could give them significant boost.

Changes in Google mean changes to rankings, right? Not exactly. Here we will cover the biggest SEO trends that don’t affect your rankings.

Amazon.com Inc is rolling out machines to automate a job held by thousands of its workers: boxing up customer orders.

I lost north of $100,000 last Wednesday. It evaporated over a 24-hour time span in a “SIM port attack” that drained my Coinbase account. It has been four days since the incident…

Amazon is famous for its drive to automate as many parts of its business as possible, whether pricing goods or transporting items in its warehouses. But the company is in a precarious position as it considers replacing jobs that have won it subsidies and public goodwill.

In fiscal 2018, Build-A-Bear opened 52 locations and closed 33, and remodeled or reformatted 12 into a Discovery format, in which the stuffer machine is moved to the middle of the store to allow for more accessories on the walls.

The 3,000 square-foot concept shop, which opened earlier this month in Los Angeles’ West Hollywood neighborhood, is focused squarely on services. From alterations and tailoring to buy online/pickup in store options and style consulting — the idea is to curate the best customer experience Nordstrom has to offer.

Experiential doesn't mean the same for every brand, concept or customer. Nike Live is the brand's first concept that is declaratively dedicated to being a hub for members. "We need our stores to better reflect the consumers in that marketplace and member insights is how we will do that," Sparks said. "The future of service will be very personal. We will know you so well we will be incredibly relevant with the product we give and the services we offer."

The stores of Old Montréal, the city’s historic section, will be featured as part of the Retail Store Tours program taking place May 23, 2019. Stores that will be visited include: SSENSE, Denis Gagnon, Crew Collective Café, Rad Hourani, Fluevog, Naïf Style.

The move to Manhattan comes at a time when many other retailers have been experimenting with pint-sized locations in urban areas. Target has opened a few small-format shops within New York and has one planned down the street from Ikea’s new store. Macy’s is trimming back some of its real estate, including testing out pop-up marketplaces at its Herald Square flagship in New York, while Kohl’s is cutting up its stores to bring in new tenants like Aldi and Planet Fitness. Many companies are thinking small.

There is strong evidence that the supply of top-tier AI talent does not meet the demand. Yet there is little visibility on precisely how scarce this talent is or where it is concentrated around the world. This report summarizes our second survey of the scope and breadth of the worldwide AI talent pool.

They indicate that consumers' mobile phones will soon become remote controls for the commercial exploration of the physical world, or, better said, they will become tools to unlock Easter eggs within shopping experiences that will vary from one individual to the next.

Paralysed business leaders needing to embrace digital transformation can do it in one of three ways:

1. The first is the digital garage approach, setting up an innovation lab, for example. Yet how do you integrate these ideas?
2. The second is the agile approach in which agile teams, leadership or whole organisations experiment from within. The challenge here is that experimentation with a framework becomes a mess.
3. The third is the top-down approach, where a leader takes a business decision to transform which permeates throughout the organisation.

In this recorded briefing RSG founder Tony Byrne takes you on a tour of a new reference model for the omnichannel era. Tony shows you how to guide your future stack investments towards supporting omnichannel needs, and what this means for content, data, decisions, and operations. If you manage one of these tech stacks, this is a must-see educational session.

Yes, we use data to make products more helpful for everyone. But we also protect your information.

This document is intended to help those with a basic knowledge of machine learning get the benefit of Google's best practices in machine learning. It presents a style for machine learning, similar to the Google C++ Style Guide and other popular guides to practical programming. If you have taken a class in machine learning, or built or worked on a machine­-learned model, then you have the necessary background to read this document.

Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

A toolkit for teams building human-centered AI products.

The People + AI Guidebook recommendations are based on data and insights from over a hundred individuals across Google product teams, industry experts, and academic research. As our research continues to evolve, so will the way we approach product design. Expect updates to the Guidebook as the field of AI moves forward—think of it as a living document.

If you look at Estonia and the digital society we have built, most fundamental innovations are not technological but they are legal innovations. The idea that the digital identity is mandatory for all people. The idea that the digital signature is equal to the paper one. These are very simple robust legal innovations.

Organizations can mitigate advanced-analytics and AI risks by embracing three principles.

Organizations can mitigate advanced-analytics and AI risks by embracing three principles.

As Amazon starts to roll out one-day shipping to its most loyal customers, it already has a logistics network spanning much of the U.S.

• Amazon is already capable of offering same-day and one-day delivery to 72% of the total U.S. population, according to RBC Capital Markets.
• The vast delivery network is a result of significant investments over the past four years.
• Amazon said on its latest earnings report that it’s making one-day delivery the default for Prime members.

Have you ever wished you could be in the room when founders present to the a16z investing team? Even better, do you wish you could stay to hear the discussion after the pitch? We hear you and are thrilled to launch our latest series of videos called "The a16z Pitch Room". This inaugural episode features the Sandbox VR team Steve Zhao and Siqi Chen pitching to General Partner Andrew Chen. Steve and Siqi present a lightly edited version of their pitch deck. Then Andrew will join them on screen and provide the “director’s commentary”: a slide-by-slide walkthrough of the presentation, describing what resonated, what didn’t, and how he thought about the investment opportunity.

From the Data Deniers to the Data Forward, your organization is on this chart. The marketing race will go to the most data-enriched organizations. Time for a look in the mirror. There are some who can read well enough to navigate a cookbook. Some can write a lengthy treatise on a complex subject. Some can... Read More

IT operations teams struggle to maintain service quality when they apply legacy approaches to monitoring. Infrastructure and operations leaders responsible for monitoring should take the steps outlined here to increase their effectiveness and limit their exposure to challenges raised by the cloud.

Frustrations with ESPs run high. Marketers told Litmus that limitations with their ESP was third on their list of biggest challenges for 2018. And 16% of brands said that changing ESPs was on their list of email marketing priorities for 2018.

In our first-ever State of Email Service Providers report, we take a detailed look at the ESP marketplace to better understand:

• The top ESPs by geography, company size, industry, and more
• The pace of consolidation in the industry and its causes
• The trends that will shape the future of the ESP landscape
• The tools and functionality provided by ESPs and how third-party tools can help balance weaknesses

Understand ESP industry consolidation, see the top ESPs by sector, and discover the most common ways to boost the functionality of an ESP.

Road traffic injuries are a leading cause of death worldwide. Proper estimation of car accident risk is critical for appropriate allocation of resources in healthcare, insurance, civil engineering, and other industries. We show how images of houses are predictive of car accidents. We analyze 20,000 addresses of insurance company clients, collect a corresponding house image using Google Street View, and annotate house features such as age, type, and condition. We find that this information substantially improves car accident risk prediction compared to the state-of-the-art risk model of the insurance company and could be used for price discrimination. From this perspective, public availability of house images raises legal and social concerns, as they can be a proxy of ethnicity, religion and other sensitive data.

A family recently discovered a rude surprise at their Airbnb: a hidden camera disguised as a smoke detector in the living room. Here are two ways to check for cameras—in an Airbnb or elsewhere—using only an iPhone or Android phone.

New research from Bossa Nova indicates retailers are in dire need of a solution for severe inventory problems and recognize that automation is the answer.

Social media management tools allow you to manage your entire social media presence from a single interface. These services simplify every aspect of managing social media, from scheduling updates to generating reports and engaging with your audience. You can even isolate the most influential members of your community or industry and keep tabs on competitors. We put 30 of the best social media management software solutions to the test, and here we'll present the nine best.

From PSFK's Accelerating Innovation In Retail report, here's how five brands are retaining valuable consumer feedback by giving selected members exclusive access to new products and services.

The big features for Blue include that it is low cost and can perform some of the basic human tasks we might want a robotic assistant of the future to perform for us. Blue can do things like fold laundry or make a cup of coffee thanks to advanced AI and deep reinforcement learning. Despite its advanced skills, the robot remains affordable and safe enough that eventually every AI researcher and home can afford one.

A simple introduction for those who always wanted to understand machine learning. Only real-world problems, practical solutions, simple language, and no high-level theorems. One and for everyone. Whether you are a programmer or a manager.

We focus in this paper on the long run impacts over
the next 20 years. Given a base year of 2017, our
projections therefore focus on impacts in 2037. This
long time horizon also allows us to ignore short
term ups and downs in employment rates linked to
the economic cycle. We estimate that AI and related technologies could displace around 26% of existing jobs in China over the next two decades.

“We chose right from the very start to not hide the technology,” Hanrahan explained.

The Technology Radar is an opinionated guide to technology frontiers. The Radar captures the output of the Technology Advisory Board’s discussions in a format that provides value to a wide range of stakeholders, from developers to CTOs. The content is intended as a concise summary.

For the past few months Tesla has been slowly sharing details of its upcoming “Hardware 3” (HW3) changes soon to be introduced into its S/X/3 lineup. Tesla has stated that cars will begin to be built with the new computer sometime in the first half of 2019, and they have said that this is a simple computer upgrade, with all vehicle sensors (radar, ultrasonics, cameras) staying the same. Today we have some information about what HW3 actually will (and won’t) be.

This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr Musk. I accepted, with full control of questions I could ask and choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. This was an insightful discussion on various aspects of Tesla Autopilot that I hope catalyzes further nuanced conversation on the future of AI-assisted driving. Starts at 2:35. The full outline of the video is as follows:
0:00 Introduction
2:35 Start of conversation: Autopilot motivation
4:01 Display the vehicle's perception of the driving scene
7:11 Algorithms, data, and hardware development
10:23 Edge cases and common cases in driving
12:18 Navigate on Autopilot
13:57 Hardware and software path toward fully autonomy
17:08 Driver supervision of Autopilot
20:13 Human side of Tesla Autopilot (driver functional vigilance)
23:13 Driver monitoring
24:30 Operational design domain
26:57 Securing Autopilot against adversarial machine learning
28:29 Narrow AI and artificial general intelligence
30:10 Physics view of love
31:53 First question for an artificial general intelligence system

The healthcare wearable industry is more than just fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors, and technology devices are being used to transform both patient and self-care, in hospitals and at home. From virtual reality to robotic artery de-cloggers, futuristic healthcare devices have the potential to improve the lives of patients in the not-too-distant future…

Passwords. We all have lots of them these days. And yet we're told repeatedly to not reuse passwords and to make them strong. For most of us, that's an opposing set of directives. Unless you have some amazing memory, there's no way that we mere mortal

We expect technology spend by CMOs to increase 10x in 10 Years from $12 billion to $120 billion, unlocking a huge opportunity for marketing technology companies and opening the door to the Decade of the CMO.

I usually avoid the A-word (architecture) because it's such a slippery term. In this case I'll be following my preferred definition of architecture - "the important stuff (whatever that is)" - from Ralph Johnson. This means I'll talk about what I think is interesting about the system's design, based both on my judgement and on the judgement of the team that's been involved in its development.

La problématique à laquelle nous faisions face était de savoir comment améliorer l’expérience client tout en créant un moment privilégié entre les vendeurs et les clients. De ce fait, grâce au cintre connecté, le vendeur deviendra davantage un conseiller stylistique et le client pourra immédiatement consulter les tailles disponibles, le prix et essayer un vêtement qui lui sera directement amené en cabine.

According to Marketplace Pulse research, Amazon-owned private label brands are not nearly as successful as many paint them to be. Amazon has been successful in creating generic items at low prices, but only when using the Amazon brand name (i.e., AmazonBasics and Amazon Essentials). Otherwise, the hundreds of brands and tens of thousands of products launched are not resonating with customers.
On the surface, Amazon is utilizing its knowledge of its powerful retail machine to steer shoppers toward its in-house brands and away from its competitors. The goal of this research was to check if this was true. To validate if the success of AmazonBasics batteries could be extrapolated to other brands and different categories.
We analyzed over 23,000 products launched by Amazon under more than 400 different brands. Some of those brands are private label brands built by Amazon, and some are exclusive brands made by a third party. All under the “Our Brands” umbrella, a collection of Amazon private brands and a curated selection of brands sold exclusively on Amazon.
According to our research the Amazon-owned Top 10 most successful private label brands, including the likes of AmazonBasics and Pinzon, contribute estimated 81% of the total sales. Amazon added more than 100 brands in 2018, but none of the recent launches are category leaders. Amazon has attracted much attention with every new brand they launched, however the assumption that every new brand will be as impactful as AmazonBasics is unfounded. It is Quantity vs. Quality - AmazonBasics represents less than 5% of products launched, but more than 57% of sales.

Get a reliable system up and running fast. For the past decade we’ve been helping organizations around the globe strengthen their innovation capabilities, and that work has taught us that there’s an important intermediate option between ad hoc innovation and building an elaborate, large-scale innovation factory: setting up a minimum viable innovation system (MVIS).

There are many business growth strategies out there, but there’s one area where nearly every business has room to improve: the mobile site speed.

Predicts 2019: New Deployment Models, Channels and Technologies Spark Digital Commerce Growth

There are a number of approaches to measurement, depending on the important metrics for your business. Google’s Jeremy Freedman walks you through the steps toward better attribution.

The boom of e-commerce isn’t leaving physical retail in the dust. It’s actually resulting in a physical retail renaissance that’s changing the game. And we all have two sources to thank for that: digitally-native vertical brands (DNVBs), and the consumers who are down for them.

Physical retail is the new place to be, and just like everything else, consumers are going old-school but with a new twist. Physical experiences are complementing the digital ones, setting the stage for distinctive, personal, and memorable interactions that can lead to lifetime brand loyalty.
And innovative DNVBs have caught on, leveraging tech, social media, and shifts in consumer buying behavior to create seamless experiences across digital and physical touch points to reshape the whole retail landscape.

The goal of checkout’s first step is to successfully move new and returning customers to the next step, and not lose customers due to usability or design problems.

Regardless of the specific design you apply, keep the following best practices in mind:

• Both new and returning customers should be able to quickly identify their login option above the fold, without scrolling, whether on desktop or mobile (especially returning customers within a “Bypass” checkout)
• New customers should not be asked to decide between creating an account or using guest checkout (unless saving information in a new account is not possible with the ecommerce platform)
• Buttons should be clearly labeled with specific text, versus “Continue” or “Checkout”
• Email should be captured as early as possible in the flow

Of course, there’s flexibility to design (and test designs) for the first step of login. Stay tuned for our upcoming Ecommerce Illustrated chapter on checkout testing tips. Have you subscribed?

In this report, TDWI uncovers deeper insights that give users new perspectives on business questions. AI will transform BI and the way people make decisions and act. Rather than start with a hypothesis, data analysts will begin with an AI-driven insight. Instead of querying data to prove or disprove their hypothesis, users will query data to expand or validate a machine-generated insight or recommendation—or they might act on the AI-based insight at face value. But to get to that point, AI-infused BI tools will need to gain people's trust by consistently delivering accurate, relevant, and transparent insights within the context of a business user’s existing workflow.
In the future, AI-infused BI tools will go beyond just surfacing insights; they will recommend ways to address or fix issues, run simulations to optimize processes, create new performance targets based on forecasts, and take action automatically. And yes, machines will make some decisions for us—especially operational decisions in real-time environments. We see this today with fraud detection and online trading systems, but it will become more pervasive.

Driverless vehicles are hardly a novel concept anymore, but what is really going on in the autonomous car industry? How do self-driving cars work? Who are making these cars? Why is it taking this long? This article will answer these questions.

In this report, TDWI uncovers deeper insights that give users new perspectives on business questions. AI will transform BI and the way people make decisions and act. Rather than start with a hypothesis, data analysts will begin with an AI-driven insight. Instead of querying data to prove or disprove their hypothesis, users will query data to expand or validate a machine-generated insight or recommendation—or they might act on the AI-based insight at face value. But to get to that point, AI-infused BI tools will need to gain people's trust by consistently delivering accurate, relevant, and transparent insights within the context of a business user’s existing workflow.
In the future, AI-infused BI tools will go beyond just surfacing insights; they will recommend ways to address or fix issues, run simulations to optimize processes, create new performance targets based on forecasts, and take action automatically. And yes, machines will make some decisions for us—especially operational decisions in real-time environments. We see this today with fraud detection and online trading systems, but it will become more pervasive.

Market Guide for Security Threat Intelligence Products and Services. Key Findings:
- The term “threat intelligence” covers a diverse set of capabilities.
Client interest in industry-led government and commercial TI has increased significantly during the past two years. There are still large numbers of providers in this market, with startups also entering.
- The number and diversity of TI services, as well as expertise, have created an environment in which purchasers often struggle to compare services, and there’s still no single provider to address all of them. Many vendors can provide access to information; fewer provide truly anticipatory content or curation based on customized intelligence.
- The value of these services is sometimes constrained by the customer’s ability to afford, absorb, contextualize and, especially, use the information provided by the services.

The final project for my machine learning class was to build a fashion neural net algorithm to correctly classify images into 7-classes using the Fashion-MNIST dataset. My team's model accuracy of 92.923% led us to the top of Kaggle's leaderboard! (the competition was only open to our class).

Les promotions en ligne sont une excellente façon de mousser vos ventes, mais aussi d’acquérir de nouveaux consommateurs et de fidéliser votre clientèle. C’est pourquoi nous vous partageons notre checklist promotionnelle. Cette liste vous permettra de propulser votre promotion et d’optimiser les retombées de celle-ci.

Digitalization is now going mainstream. For example, the Economist has devoted a full issue to it.  “Whether you are going for a run, watching TV or even just sitting in traffic, virtually every activity creates a digital trace—more raw material for the data distilleries. Meanwhile, artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as Machine Learning extract more value from data. Algorithms can predict when a customer is ready to buy, a jet-engine needs servicing or a person is at risk of a disease.”

The End of Free Returns + Sales Tax Everywhere? Discover the 10 eCommerce Trends That Will Impact Retailers and Consumers in 2019.

What is 5G? Why do we care? How much faster does the pipe get? What can we do with a fatter pipe?  How does this relate to VR? Cars? Broadband? What’s the killer app? 

At the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas this week, billed as the world’s largest conference for retail and e-commerce innovation, fashion tech startup Heuritech launched the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) service that can predict fashion trends based on the analysis of millions of images shared every day on social media.

This is an industry report designed to establish benchmarks for how organizations are developing and maintaining the quality of software in 2018.

Augmented reality (AR) – technology that overlays computer imagery over real-world imagery as seen by cameras in real time, is being eagerly adopted by business.
In retail, in particular, there are obvious opportunities for allowing customers to see how products will fit into their lives before they've taken them out of the store.

We’re rolling out two new features, Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection, to keep your information safe beyond Google’s sites and apps.

The Magicverse is an Emergent System of Systems bridging the physical with the digital, in a large scale, persistent manner within a community of people.

To summarize, Hollister and Watkins write, “What tradeoffs are we willing to make? In other words, if we do this, what won’t get done?” Choosing tradeoffs and setting limits are hard. Organizations are often scared to forgo any initiative when a competitor is knee-deep in it. Partly, this can be traced back to human disposition.

As a devastating disease afflicts the country’s swine, companies are scrambling to roll out facial and voice recognition and other unproven ways to save them.

Last week brought an extraordinary demonstration of the dangers of operating a surveillance state — especially a shabby one, as China’s apparently is. An unsecured database exposed millions of records of Chinese Muslims being tracked via facial recognition — an ugly trifecta of prejudice, bureaucracy and incompetence.

Whether it was here on Hackaday or elsewhere on the Internet, you’ve surely heard more than a few cautionary tales about the “Internet of Things” by now. As it turns out, giving every gadget you own access to your personal information and Internet connection can lead to unintended consequences. Who knew, right? But if you need yet another example of why trusting your home appliances with your secrets is potentially a bad idea, [Limited Results] is here to make sure you spend the next few hours doubting your recent tech purchases.

Artificial intelligence has not only become an international arms race, competition has now heated up as companies look to adopt machine learning/deep learning at an unprecedented pace. But the conversation about AI has largely focused on pitting humanity against AI, instead of what happens when we bring together humans *with* AI. In this talk by a16z operating partner Frank Chen, given at the annual a16z Summit, Chen goes beyond the hype to look forward at how AI and automation will augment, enhance, create, and yes, replace humans…. but also highlighting what it is that makes us human to begin with.

Every day there seems to be a new way that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is used behind the scenes to enhance our daily lives and improve business for many of today’s leading companies. Here are 27 amazing, and practical examples of AI and machine learning.

More than 1,300 people mainly working in the tech, finance and healthcare revealed which machine-learning technologies they use at their firms, in a new O'Reilly survey.

Average open rates are between 15% and 25% range, depending on industry, so for the 75% to 85% of recipients who do not open any given email they receive, the subject line IS the email. The ultimate email marketing guide is free to discover the trends that will impact email marketing in 2019.

Beyond the world of email marketing in the wider world of business, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity and employment has risen to prominence in the last two plus years as more affordable systems have become available from vendors. This has naturally prompted marketers to review the potential marketing applications of AI. To answer this question, in our guide to marketing applications of AI , Smart Insights has reviewed the opportunities and tools for AI across the customer lifecycle. This report highlights the critical trends and techniques that will help you transform your brand-customer relationships using the most powerful channel in your marketing mix: email!

In 2019, email marketing remains one the most effective techniques for digital marketers, so keeping up-to-date with the latest trends, best practice techniques, and technologies for email marketing remains extremely important. Our recent Managing Digital Marketing in 2019 report shows that over two-thirds of marketers rated email marketing as providing the highest or medium return-on-investment (ROI) when compared to other channels.

The role of a chief executive requires vision above all else. At Shoptalk, execs from Gap, Macy's, Nordstrom, Lowe's and a host of disruptors offered insights from a unique industry perch.

The golden era of AI is here. But how can organizations best harness the technology and integrate it seamlessly into their CRM? This MIT report explores the next-gen powers of AI for CRM. Download the whitepaper for a deep dive on how Salesforce Platform, embedded with Einstein, turns customer data into predictive insights to deliver the most personalized, intelligent experiences for both customers and employees.

“No industry,” wrote Harvard Business Review at the close of 2018, “is failing faster than retail.” At risk of contradicting the Crimson: bullshit. Sweeping proclamations make for great sound bites and (scholarly) clickbait. But the truth? Not so much.

At the opposite extreme lay headlines trumpeting “voice-search buying,” “Instagram-worthy pop-ups,” and “VR-enabled O2O experiences.”

What the data shows — and what the leaders we spoke to from brands at the forefront said — isn’t that retail is failing nor that success is tied to innovation for innovation’s sake. Instead, it points to the now unignorable center of commerce: customer choice. What is the future of ecommerce for 2019 and beyond? 10 insights offer the answer:
Ecommerce v Retail: The Dichotomy Ends
DTC Emerges as Commerce’s Future
More than “Digitally Native” Tactics
Content Becomes the Holy Grail of Growth
Physical and Digital Solidify Their Relationship
Social Commerce Evolves or Limps to the Grave
Channels Must Deliver on Their Promises
Mobile Buying Is (Almost) the New Normal
Micro-Moments Win or Lose Conversions
International Ecommerce Expands to the East

Google Glass lived a short, sad life. And when you look back, it feels like a bit of a dream. But the dream isn’t over yet, because Glass has found itself an industrial career.

Early adopters of agile customer support are achieving impressive performance gains by empowering frontline workers to excel as team-based problem solvers.

Altimeter's annual 'State of Digital Transformation' research documents the constantly evolving enterprise. Our research captures the shifts and trends shaping modern digital transformation.

The U.K.-based foundation is looking to reach a broader audience through its first brick-and-mortar location.

AI offers a helping digital hand to overburdened B2B marketing departments.

Between Initial Coin Offerings, new patents being announced, and new pilots being initiated, seemingly every day, blockchain-related activity is exploding. Here is the latest round up of developments that apply to retail.

development or prepackaged integrations. CSPs have web, desktop and mobile app interfaces that let users navigate through and work with the different content services. The platforms may also offer prebuilt solutions for vertical and horizontal content processes such as case management, legal matter management, contract management and many more. CSPs are available on-premises, as hosted services, in the cloud (SaaS and/or PaaS) or in hybrid architectures that combine cloud and on-premises storage and/or services.

Gartner has recognized ThoughtSpot as a Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms. ThoughtSpot’s search and AI-driven analytics platform makes it easy for anyone to get insights in seconds.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be working in the retail industry. Ten years from now, consumers will look back and say: “Did shopping really look like that in 2019?”

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots. Nuro has raised more than $1 billion.

Text isn't always an efficient way to deliver instructions, describe problems, or share knowledge. Writing out descriptions can take significantly longer than just showing someone your screen. But you're usually not standing next to the person or people who need to see your screen.

Amazon quietly rolled out Amazon Showroom, a tool that lets you place furniture in a virtual living room, making online furniture shopping more visual.

In China, the either-or retail equation is being cast aside for New Retail, which merges the best of the in-store and online experiences. To Alibaba, success these days also means helping brands go omnichannel. An increasing number of brands are doing just that, tapping Alibaba’s New Retail tools, erasing the lines between online and offline. 

The key to New Retail is the mobile phone, which provides the critical connection between online and offline retail to consumers. Brands in China have an advantage here because they don’t need to convince consumers to download and use their apps. That’s because they know 500 million consumers already have the Tmall app. “China is moving much faster than the West in this evolution because the Western retail model is built on legacy systems. China’s model is disruptive,” said Frank Lavin, CEO of ExportNow, a company which helps Western brands sell to China. “China does not have the legacy of malls and big-box stores like the West. China has no traditional retail model to defend.”

Test-driven development, or TDD, involves writing tests first then developing the minimal code needed to pass the tests. TDD is an established practice for feature development that can improve code quality and test coverage. What about other, non-functional requirements such as scalability, reliability, observability, and other architectural “-ilities”? How do we ensure operability and resiliency of features when they go to production? How can we encourage teams to build in these architectural standards, just as test-driven development builds in code quality and test coverage?